http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/Community/NewsArticles/Pages/fallout3_interview.aspx
Games for Windows Interview with Bethesda’s Todd Howard
By John Ryan
Gamesforwindows.com Correspondent
Todd Howard is an Executive Producer at Bethesda Softworks. For Fallout 3, he also worked as the game director. This interview took place on October 9, the day the game went gold.
Visit the Fallout 3 page for
more details about this game
Games for Windows: Why Fallout 3? What was it about Fallout that said “this is our next game”?
Todd Howard: We were in the middle of Oblivion at the time and we were trying to figure out what we'd do after it. We were thinking about the next project, and we had been doing Elder Scrolls games for 10 years at the time. We wanted to do the kind of game that we’d normally do, but in a different fashion. Fallout was at the top of that list.
GFW: When Bethesda took over the Fallout series, were you planning a Fallout game then or was this something you wanted to have in your library for a future game?
TH: We thought about Fallout before we acquired it. It was something we really liked to do as our next project. We knew a lot of people at Interplay. It took a while, but we ended up getting the rights.
GFW: Why was it at top of your list?
TH: We really liked the first game. It fit the style of the games we've done: being an isolated guy or girl and doing whatever you wanted to. We also really liked the world, that whole post-apocalyptic world with this retro sci-fi feel, the underground vaults, the blue jumpsuits. The whole thing has a really unique charm about it that has not been replicated since. We talked about creating our own post-apocalyptic game, but Fallout was the one we really wanted to do.
GFW: What did you learn from Oblivion that you brought to Fallout 3?
TH: A lot of it first and foremost came from the hardware, how things worked on the PC or the Xbox 360, how video cards worked with shaders and such. We built a whole new architecture for Oblivion and we learned a lot. And then we learned how people experienced our games, from being thrust into a world and not knowing what to do, and if they do something, how do they know if they are succeeding.
Oblivion hit a level of success where we were able to get a lot of feedback about what players liked or didn't or what confused them. We hope that we addressed all of that with Fallout.
GFW: What was the challenge behind making a game that could appeal to new players as well as Fallout diehards?
TH: Similar to when we did the Elder Scrolls, in that each is made to stand on its own, and we assume you haven’t played the other ones. For Fallout 3, we tried to interpret the core concepts of the earlier games to make it cool for the audience. From the old games, we put in the back story. If you never played the other games, it's still just good back story. We approach it assuming you never played the other games, and if you did, you might have forgotten it.
GFW: Fallout 3 takes place 30 years after Fallout 2. Was this an attempt at telling your own story?
TH: Yes, definitely. We set it on the East Coast and we tell a different story. We did fit into the timeline, and we wanted to use the classic factions from old games. But this is the story we are telling and it makes sense it would happen at this period of time.
GFW: What were the biggest challenges in keeping the core things that made Fallout unique (style, gameplay, humor) intact while implementing an entirely new gameplay engine?
TH: To form the world, we made our list of rules, rights and wrongs...how sci-fi is done in the Fallout world and how it's not done, humor that's appropriate or not. We found our way with the tone…when it gets dramatic and funny, and when there's action. We were finding the right beats so it's not a big mess. (laughs) Tone-wise, it can be hard to pin down.
In the execution, you look at a piece of art from the first game 10 years ago and you go about presenting it in another way. If you replicated something like a gun out of the first game, it wouldn’t look good now. So we looked at what inspired it, like 1950s’ science experiments or the source materials they used for Fallout 1.
When it comes to combat, it’s pretty similar to how they used stats in the first game, but now it’s done in real time.
GFW: What’s the thing you are most proud of in Fallout 3 that you worked on?
TH: I worked on a lot of things, but there are two things I'm proud of. One is the vibe of survival and desolation. The other is VATS, the combat system. We're really happy with how it ended up. We were worried it might get old or too repetitive, but it's a ton of fun.
GFW: How did you imagine a futuristic Washington D.C.? And why the move to Washington? Was it a little eerie to design an area you live in or near as a bombed-out wasteland?
TH: It was fun to think about a government that would be around in Fallout. It would be a bit oppressive and build things too big to show their power. We had to show people what world was like before the bombs and after the bombs. We became more interested in the world that existed before it was blown up.
As for why D.C, we felt it hadn't been done a lot. We live in D.C. and it was a great backdrop with iconic structures blown up in the game. Also there are themes with what the government is like and who is in control. It became a perfect backdrop for the game and for us.
In the last six months, I have been playing the game and then having an experience when I would go to D.C. at night. I would be driving in and see places where I saw mutants when I played. Kinda surreal.
GFW: How did you imagine the end of the world? How did you know when you got it just right?
TH: We imagined a survival piece. We imagined it as themes of sacrifice and survival, and the people who live by sacrificing and surviving.
We got it right when a lot of people played the game. Everyone was doing something different to stay alive, like how they were getting skills, getting money, buying drugs, or how they were good guys or bad guys. It's not about right or wrong, but what hard decisions you had to make to stay alive. A big element of the bleakness is what hard choices the players have to make to stay alive.
The trick there was when we envisioned the world as bleak and very blasted. The Wasteland area was to be sunbaked and have big vistas. The cities had crumbling walls with rebar and dust falling on your head, a concrete destroyed jungle. But it’s not to be boring, or boring in the Wasteland and confusing in the cities. We went through a lot of iterations. We eventually got it right by putting the right amount of content, something where you experience something even when you explore a roadside five and dime. You go in and rummage for food, but turn around and there's a raider with a baseball bat. It's cool, intense and lonely.
GFW: Where did you go for inspiration about Fallout 3 world?
TH: Movie-wise, Mad Max, A Boy and His Dog, Dr. Strangelove. A lot of 1950s advertisements, too. They have this cheery happy thing to them, unintentionally hilarious if you see them now. Sexism, too…things you would never do now.
We looked a lot at Hiroshima, how atomic destruction would destroy things. And then we visited the area near us to see the scale...how did it feel to walk from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, what was the flavor of that?
GFW: There's a story about the guy who programmed Missile Command years ago. He would make the game by day but have nightmares about nuclear war at night. Did creating so much devastation ever bother you?
TH: Not a lot. It would creep us out when we heard something on the news. People want to blow up D.C. in real life, so that would freak us out. Fallout has humor. We get it, the players get it, and the violence is over the top. It was rare that it would creep us out. It was just fun.
GFW: Favorite cobbled together weapon? Favorite monster?
TH: It's changed from time to time, but now it's the dart gun. You make it out of a kid's toy car, some surgical tubing, and poison from radscorpions. You can build it as a stealth gun that poisons people.
As for the monster, it's the Deathclaw. We haven't shown it to anyone yet. It's been in previous Fallout games, and I think our interpretation of it is really cool. They are really scary.
GFW: I’ve read that the main story is 25 hours out of the 100 hours of gameplay. How did you guys create interest in inviting players explore the rest of the Wasteland?
TH: It's about 20 hours, give or take. The whole game is over 100 hours.
A lot of it was trying to create it so you never feel super powerful, but powerful enough not to die. You find and use resources quickly. A good game design device is to get the player consuming and collecting. It gets kind of addictive, feeling like it's never enough. Also, when you discover places, you get experience. You get the Pavlov experience to explore, level up, get new powers, and try the powers out. Plus we have a have nice spider web of quests where it'll drag you into another one. By the time you finish one, you'll have picked up another one so it's addictive and you’ll never want to put the controller down.
GFW: At what point in production do you just say "Okay we aren’t adding anything else in...It’s too much"?
TH: (laughs) I have someone who works for me who forces me to stop. We stopped adding things about three months ago. We stopped adding big things six months ago. Then we played the game and balanced it. There were opportunities to add things, maybe add something to connect two things better.
GFW: Is it true there are more than 200 possible endings?
TH: That's false. It's about a thousand, based on decisions made throughout the game. I like to say there are multiple endings.
GFW: What's the downloadable content schedule planned as?
TH: We don't have a schedule yet. We just started work on DLC. There will be multiple DLCs over the next year, not as big as Shivering Isles, but like Knights of the Nine, a package of quests and weapons.
(Note: The downloadable content will be exclusive to Xbox 360 and Games for Windows players)
GFW: For new players, what do you recommend for perks or where to go first in Fallout 3?
TH: We're leaving it up to them. That's the beauty of the game. A lot of people go for the weapon skills at first, but all avenues lead to you being powerful.
GFW: What’s your favorite Fallout 3 perk?
TH: Mysterious Stranger. Once in a while this guy will show up and help you in combat. He even has his own theme music when he comes in.
GFW: How do you feel this close to the finish line?
TH: We just went gold. It feels great. We are really happy with how it turned out. We are just excited to have everyone play it and see what they think.
Games for Windows Interview with Bethesda’s Todd Howard
By John Ryan
Gamesforwindows.com Correspondent
Todd Howard is an Executive Producer at Bethesda Softworks. For Fallout 3, he also worked as the game director. This interview took place on October 9, the day the game went gold.
Visit the Fallout 3 page for
more details about this game
Games for Windows: Why Fallout 3? What was it about Fallout that said “this is our next game”?
Todd Howard: We were in the middle of Oblivion at the time and we were trying to figure out what we'd do after it. We were thinking about the next project, and we had been doing Elder Scrolls games for 10 years at the time. We wanted to do the kind of game that we’d normally do, but in a different fashion. Fallout was at the top of that list.
GFW: When Bethesda took over the Fallout series, were you planning a Fallout game then or was this something you wanted to have in your library for a future game?
TH: We thought about Fallout before we acquired it. It was something we really liked to do as our next project. We knew a lot of people at Interplay. It took a while, but we ended up getting the rights.
GFW: Why was it at top of your list?
TH: We really liked the first game. It fit the style of the games we've done: being an isolated guy or girl and doing whatever you wanted to. We also really liked the world, that whole post-apocalyptic world with this retro sci-fi feel, the underground vaults, the blue jumpsuits. The whole thing has a really unique charm about it that has not been replicated since. We talked about creating our own post-apocalyptic game, but Fallout was the one we really wanted to do.
GFW: What did you learn from Oblivion that you brought to Fallout 3?
TH: A lot of it first and foremost came from the hardware, how things worked on the PC or the Xbox 360, how video cards worked with shaders and such. We built a whole new architecture for Oblivion and we learned a lot. And then we learned how people experienced our games, from being thrust into a world and not knowing what to do, and if they do something, how do they know if they are succeeding.
Oblivion hit a level of success where we were able to get a lot of feedback about what players liked or didn't or what confused them. We hope that we addressed all of that with Fallout.
GFW: What was the challenge behind making a game that could appeal to new players as well as Fallout diehards?
TH: Similar to when we did the Elder Scrolls, in that each is made to stand on its own, and we assume you haven’t played the other ones. For Fallout 3, we tried to interpret the core concepts of the earlier games to make it cool for the audience. From the old games, we put in the back story. If you never played the other games, it's still just good back story. We approach it assuming you never played the other games, and if you did, you might have forgotten it.
GFW: Fallout 3 takes place 30 years after Fallout 2. Was this an attempt at telling your own story?
TH: Yes, definitely. We set it on the East Coast and we tell a different story. We did fit into the timeline, and we wanted to use the classic factions from old games. But this is the story we are telling and it makes sense it would happen at this period of time.
GFW: What were the biggest challenges in keeping the core things that made Fallout unique (style, gameplay, humor) intact while implementing an entirely new gameplay engine?
TH: To form the world, we made our list of rules, rights and wrongs...how sci-fi is done in the Fallout world and how it's not done, humor that's appropriate or not. We found our way with the tone…when it gets dramatic and funny, and when there's action. We were finding the right beats so it's not a big mess. (laughs) Tone-wise, it can be hard to pin down.
In the execution, you look at a piece of art from the first game 10 years ago and you go about presenting it in another way. If you replicated something like a gun out of the first game, it wouldn’t look good now. So we looked at what inspired it, like 1950s’ science experiments or the source materials they used for Fallout 1.
When it comes to combat, it’s pretty similar to how they used stats in the first game, but now it’s done in real time.
GFW: What’s the thing you are most proud of in Fallout 3 that you worked on?
TH: I worked on a lot of things, but there are two things I'm proud of. One is the vibe of survival and desolation. The other is VATS, the combat system. We're really happy with how it ended up. We were worried it might get old or too repetitive, but it's a ton of fun.
GFW: How did you imagine a futuristic Washington D.C.? And why the move to Washington? Was it a little eerie to design an area you live in or near as a bombed-out wasteland?
TH: It was fun to think about a government that would be around in Fallout. It would be a bit oppressive and build things too big to show their power. We had to show people what world was like before the bombs and after the bombs. We became more interested in the world that existed before it was blown up.
As for why D.C, we felt it hadn't been done a lot. We live in D.C. and it was a great backdrop with iconic structures blown up in the game. Also there are themes with what the government is like and who is in control. It became a perfect backdrop for the game and for us.
In the last six months, I have been playing the game and then having an experience when I would go to D.C. at night. I would be driving in and see places where I saw mutants when I played. Kinda surreal.
GFW: How did you imagine the end of the world? How did you know when you got it just right?
TH: We imagined a survival piece. We imagined it as themes of sacrifice and survival, and the people who live by sacrificing and surviving.
We got it right when a lot of people played the game. Everyone was doing something different to stay alive, like how they were getting skills, getting money, buying drugs, or how they were good guys or bad guys. It's not about right or wrong, but what hard decisions you had to make to stay alive. A big element of the bleakness is what hard choices the players have to make to stay alive.
The trick there was when we envisioned the world as bleak and very blasted. The Wasteland area was to be sunbaked and have big vistas. The cities had crumbling walls with rebar and dust falling on your head, a concrete destroyed jungle. But it’s not to be boring, or boring in the Wasteland and confusing in the cities. We went through a lot of iterations. We eventually got it right by putting the right amount of content, something where you experience something even when you explore a roadside five and dime. You go in and rummage for food, but turn around and there's a raider with a baseball bat. It's cool, intense and lonely.
GFW: Where did you go for inspiration about Fallout 3 world?
TH: Movie-wise, Mad Max, A Boy and His Dog, Dr. Strangelove. A lot of 1950s advertisements, too. They have this cheery happy thing to them, unintentionally hilarious if you see them now. Sexism, too…things you would never do now.
We looked a lot at Hiroshima, how atomic destruction would destroy things. And then we visited the area near us to see the scale...how did it feel to walk from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, what was the flavor of that?
GFW: There's a story about the guy who programmed Missile Command years ago. He would make the game by day but have nightmares about nuclear war at night. Did creating so much devastation ever bother you?
TH: Not a lot. It would creep us out when we heard something on the news. People want to blow up D.C. in real life, so that would freak us out. Fallout has humor. We get it, the players get it, and the violence is over the top. It was rare that it would creep us out. It was just fun.
GFW: Favorite cobbled together weapon? Favorite monster?
TH: It's changed from time to time, but now it's the dart gun. You make it out of a kid's toy car, some surgical tubing, and poison from radscorpions. You can build it as a stealth gun that poisons people.
As for the monster, it's the Deathclaw. We haven't shown it to anyone yet. It's been in previous Fallout games, and I think our interpretation of it is really cool. They are really scary.
GFW: I’ve read that the main story is 25 hours out of the 100 hours of gameplay. How did you guys create interest in inviting players explore the rest of the Wasteland?
TH: It's about 20 hours, give or take. The whole game is over 100 hours.
A lot of it was trying to create it so you never feel super powerful, but powerful enough not to die. You find and use resources quickly. A good game design device is to get the player consuming and collecting. It gets kind of addictive, feeling like it's never enough. Also, when you discover places, you get experience. You get the Pavlov experience to explore, level up, get new powers, and try the powers out. Plus we have a have nice spider web of quests where it'll drag you into another one. By the time you finish one, you'll have picked up another one so it's addictive and you’ll never want to put the controller down.
GFW: At what point in production do you just say "Okay we aren’t adding anything else in...It’s too much"?
TH: (laughs) I have someone who works for me who forces me to stop. We stopped adding things about three months ago. We stopped adding big things six months ago. Then we played the game and balanced it. There were opportunities to add things, maybe add something to connect two things better.
GFW: Is it true there are more than 200 possible endings?
TH: That's false. It's about a thousand, based on decisions made throughout the game. I like to say there are multiple endings.
GFW: What's the downloadable content schedule planned as?
TH: We don't have a schedule yet. We just started work on DLC. There will be multiple DLCs over the next year, not as big as Shivering Isles, but like Knights of the Nine, a package of quests and weapons.
(Note: The downloadable content will be exclusive to Xbox 360 and Games for Windows players)
GFW: For new players, what do you recommend for perks or where to go first in Fallout 3?
TH: We're leaving it up to them. That's the beauty of the game. A lot of people go for the weapon skills at first, but all avenues lead to you being powerful.
GFW: What’s your favorite Fallout 3 perk?
TH: Mysterious Stranger. Once in a while this guy will show up and help you in combat. He even has his own theme music when he comes in.
GFW: How do you feel this close to the finish line?
TH: We just went gold. It feels great. We are really happy with how it turned out. We are just excited to have everyone play it and see what they think.